Collins’ book caught the attention of a Blink Films, a U.K.-based production company. It approached the Marine Institute in St. John’s and asked it to do a simulation.

“They were really intrigued by this,” says Capt. Chris Hearn, director of the institute’s Centre for Marine Simulation at the School of Maritime Studies.

“They were also intrigued by the fact that we could build a Titanic here, or a model of it, and they could go on and test some theories. They were also looking at the ship’s speed, how fast was she travelling and, if she had been travelling slower, would she have been able to (navigate) the ice at different accelerations.”

Hearn says the simulation was a success and the company turned it into a documentary.

“Looking at this as we did,” he continues, “made us question, actually, the size of the ice(berg).”

Hearn is now of a similar mind to Collins.

He thinks the Titanic struck a smaller piece or pieces of ice, something the crew didn’t see until the last minute.

“This great big, gigantic, lumbering piece of ice? I don’t know about that,” he says, noting that all the evidence is sitting on the ocean floor and rests with people who are no longer with us.

Collins, who isn’t a fan of the Titanic simulation, acknowledges it would take a major shift for the world to believe his theory.

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Dee

April 20, 2012 - 20:58

I agree completely. Reports of ice on the deck could have been ice off the rigging. The decks of the Titanic was some 80 feet above the surface and even the lookouts said it didn't appear to be that high. People not accustomed to ice will call pan ice "ice bergs," so once everyone else was saying iceberg, they just said the same thing. And Tim Matlin's investigations into cold water mirage prove that it would have been impossible to see the berg or ice because the horizon was artificially above where it was in actuality. Another documentary this week also determined that the large amount of slag in the rivets meant it took less than 10,000 lbs of pressure to pop them. Pan ice can do that. A berg would have torn the side off with millions of pounds of pressure. And finally, the damage found was exactly what you'd expect from pan ice...the "morse code" pattern down the side, not a gash. Good on you, Mr. Collins.

The BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/titanic/) has several archived audio accounts from both passengers and crew of the Titantic. One survivor, who was about 20 yrs old at the time, said that after the collsion she could see the iceberg next to the ship. She also said that there were chunks of ice which had fallen onto the decks of the Titantic after it had collided with the iceberg.